The topic of mindfulness has been gaining more popularity over the years. This has led to an explosion in the amount of research to study the benefits that can be gained from mindfulness. With an increase in the amount of studies related to mindfulness, there has been an increase in the amount of studies related to Mindful Eating. I will look at some of the latest research in Mindful Eating and provide you with a quick summary on what research has discovered on the topic. There has not been many studies on Mindful Eating but the goal here is to compile all of the studies and provide you with everything that you need to know.
Study Most people closely associate Mindfulness with being able to control your thoughts and change your behavior whenever you want to.
This study attempted to put that to the test with Mindful Eating. This study focuses on the concept of reversal learning, which is training a behavior with a specific reward and punishment and then flipping the reward and punishment to see how the subject will adjust their behavior.
The participants who spent more time learning mindful eating showed greater behavior flexibility than those that didn't and those who spend more time with Mindful Eating showed greater flexibility than those who didn't.
Study Mindful Eating is all about becoming aware of the thoughts and feelings that you have while eating.
This study was not done directly on Mindful Eating but it was done on attentive eating which is an important component of Mindful Eating.
This study is a meta study on all of the studies that have involved attentive eating. Various studies were looked at involving the following: examining the effects of distraction on immediate intake, examining effects of distractions on later food intake, examining the effect of decreasing awareness on immediate intake, examining the effect of increased attention on immediate intake, and examining the effect of enhancing memory on later intake.
The study found that distractions increased later food intake more than immediate food intake.
"The results suggest that reducing attention via distraction during eating may increase immediate intake, although the size of this effect is smaller than the effect that distraction produces on later consumption. Enhancing memory for food consumed decreases later intake with a medium effect size. Reducing awareness of food consumed was shown to increase immediate food intake, and the size of this effect was large"
Study This study looks at Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training(MB-EAT) and how it relates to the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy – Spiritual Well-Being Subscale (FACIT-Sp).The FACIT-Sp factors are Meaning/Peace and faith. This study is based on the hypothesis that a high FACIT-Sp score relates to emotional balance and improvement in eating disorders.
The results of the study showed that FACIT-Sp factors increased "significantly" in the MB-EAT group and remained stable in the control group.
They believe that increases in his factor relate to "improvement in emotional adjustment and eating regulation"
Study This study published in Obesity Reviews is a meta study that compares Mindful Eating and Intuitive Eating studies with conventional dieting studies.
The authors wrote the study with the assumption that diets proved to be unsustainable and ineffective long term.
Since this study is a meta study, it does not directly compare Mindful Eating and dieting in a single study.
Still the results are interesting and I hope there are more studies on this topic in the future.
Study This final study is a literature review on the role and effectiveness of mindfulness. The results of this study say mindfulness and mindful eating interventions are most successful when used to reduce binge eating, emotional eating, and eating in response to an emotional cue. The researchers found that in terms of weight loss, the results were more mixed.
"In overweight individuals, the impact of mindfulness and mindful eating on reducing body weight was mixed; it might be that mindfulness and mindful eating have a role to play in the prevention of weight gain. Mindfulness/mindful eating resulted in a positive shift in food habits and in the quantities of food consumed in some studies. There is evidence both for the efficacy of one-off mindfulness interventions and also for the benefit of repeated practice on improving outcomes.
"So the studies show that Mindfulness might not help you lose weight, but there are benefits to be gained in the reduction of emotional eating responses.